Sylvia's Journal

My knitting and sewing material, plus an exercise ball, some 100 licorice tea bags and a good stash of licorice should be on their way to Dubai right now and onward to Kabul tomorrow, if everything is going to plan. I dropped a full suitcase off at Alain’s house in Belmont. When I turned around heading home I joined the avant-garde of the big Labor Day exodus into vacation lands further north.

The carpal tunnel doctor must have been among these vacationers because when I showed up for the appointment he was not there. This wiped away the fantasy I had nursed to leave for Afghanistan with the next diagnostic step (an EMG) completed. That would have made it possible to have the surgery during my Christmas vacation, if so advised. Scheduling such things during my short leave around Christmas is unlikely. So I will go one step at a time with only one step completed before my departure.

My work these days consists of combing through the draft work plans of my three teams in Kabul. It is detailed work which is not my forte, and thus somewhat stressful. It also requires sitting in front of a computer which is hard on the body, especially the mess of traumatized muscles in my neck and upper back. I finally had to resort to chemicals to manage the discomfort.

I had my second PT appointment and my arm and shoulder feel so limber this morning that I could easily forget to put my sling on. The range of motion is improving rapidly. I can do things I am probably not supposed to do without any discomfort, such as hanging a (small and light) picture on our newly painted living room walls. I do it when Axel is not watching. The urge to move everything back to normalcy and into the empty living room is hard to contain. Now that the hearth is in it feels completed, yet we are still waiting for the cabinet maker to put in the bookshelves that we had forgotten in the original design some 16 years ago. So there will be more sawing and hammering and normalcy will have to wait and my office will remain a storage room.

We attended a cocktail party with town officials at Woody’s to say goodbye and thank Nina, a member of Axel’s Community Preservation Committee. As chairman of the committee he has benefitted greatly from her contributions. Nina has one rule for committee meetings: at 9 PM she gets up and leaves, saying that a one hour meeting should be a one hour meeting. It has kept everyone on task and left more time for the guys to get a beer afterwards in the local pub.

Axel will soon be leaving this committee as well and he is still looking for a person to take over the chairmanship. Serving on town committees is usually considered a thankless and pain-in-the-neck job; yet there they were last night, all people who do this with (mostly) good humor and much dedication. Community stewardship still exists and I am happy and proud that Axel is one of these stewards.

When we returned home I could stay up just enough to say ‘hi and bye’ to Sita who arrived with Jim for a short night. By now she is at the airport waiting to board her flight to points further west, on her way to China. She will return in 12 days via San Diego, just in time to see me off to points further east. She left us a nice good bye drawing, as she always does; she is, after all, an illustrator.